Blessed Art Thou; Or, It's Totally Your Lucky Day!
Gather the blankets & glasses of milk, bring the cookies if you got 'em, because it's time for a little story. (Mandy, stop pulling my hair & settle down!) Go back, back, waaaaay back here, to the big bang, aka the genesis of this here blog-thing. Following the standard "Hey world friends! This is my blog! Hey!" post, the very first thing I wrote about was a filmmaker by the name of Phil Solomon. The words were few, succinct (I used to try!) & heartfelt (to the max, Phil. Heh. I've hardly begun to exhaust my repertoire). What I did not mention was that I had actually had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Solomon on more than one occasion, in more than one state (& I use "state" with more than one meaning, naturally), over the course of several years. I even chauffeured him to TJ's house - that would be Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, for those who aren't hip to the C-ville slang - in a pick-up in, I think, 2004. Alas! sadly, that had been the last of it.
Until very recently, when Mr. Solomon found my feeble little post about him & left me a wonderful comment, which gave me a case of the warm fuzzies you wouldn't believe. Subsequently, memories were jogged & communications (re-)established. All to your benefit, friends, as I've laid my grubby little paws on clips from some of his films!
Now, I realize that I am slightly inclined toward hyperbole. I am simply helpless in the face of that with which I am enthralled, be it positively or negatively. My words can be a minefield of superlatives. However! If you took the whole of every aggrandizing statement I've ever made, every command & must & implore & love & amazing & so forth, & you put them in a mortar & mashed them to a splendidly redolent paste, the resulting bouquet would still not do these films justice.
My limited mind knows not how to provide a better introduction. Tell me you believe me. Better yet, just watch the clips. I provide them to you out of love. (And if you love me, you'll watch them, bitches.) Yes, they are necessarily but pale ghosts of the films entire; but after all, as Double Exposure so well put it, "Ten percent of something/It beats one hundred percent of nothing at all"!
3 comments:
I finally got these to work! And by "work" I mean I stopped trying to watch on a PC and used Firefox on my Mac at home. Anyhow.
These are wonderful, April. Thanks for posting. And thanks to Mr. Solomon for putting them up.
I found myself saying, "Weird!" aloud, to myself, alone. Translation, "I'm compelled!" not to be confused with "I'm turned-off!".
I'm prone to gravitate towards the clips with sound, but I really really like "What's Out Tonight is Lost" and "Clepsydra" is amazing. But yeah, "Remains to be Seen" and "Psalm III" are also excellent. I know nothing of film, but these make me super curious about technique and all that. They remind me of Photoshopped moving images.
PS: The link for "Clepsydra" is actually broken, but it's not hard to figure out. Just remove the "http://www.blogger.com/" from the front. Blogger fuckers.
Oh shit. I just watched "The Snowman" again. It's fucking awesome.
You know what these remind me of? Remember when we went to that "viewing" at The Bridge over in Belmont (VA) and it was terrible? I would've given money to those guys for the rest of my life had they shown these (or similar) clips.
Sorry it took so long to post- have not had much consistent time on the comp lately.
First I must say that it is a lovely treasure to be able to watch all of these clips consecutively- I feel like I am gorging myself like some kind of Phil Solomon glutton.
You know my feelings about "The Exquisite Hour". I am really looking forward to watching it again in its entirety. This was such a tease.
I really love the clip from "Secret Garden". It reminds me of the Aurora Borealis. To quote a model I was recently stuck on a bus with in South Beach, "I like things that are shiny. I don't know why! (giggle giggle)".
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